Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  We duck around the heavy oak and iron strapping of the forge’s open door. I watch as his eyes light from marvel to marvel—a vast hearth with access from either side; a pair of long cooling tanks; six bellows cleverly suspended from the rafters; a wall hung with hammers, tongs, chisels, rasps, and swages of every size and shape. His eyes land on an iron flagon with an enameled rim, hold steady as he scrutinizes the handiwork. “My work is better,” he says, but even as he speaks his voice falls. Is he realizing, as am I, that of the forge’s dozen anvils only three are occupied? A blacksmith with the belly of a drinker looks up from an anvil, and I take in the lopsided slant of his mouth. He approaches, waddling, taking his time, but with hammer still gripped in his fist. He introduces himself to my father as Head Smith, not bothering with even a sideways glance toward me. He sneers when my father cannot say who gave us passage, only that the gate was unmanned. “Look at you.” Head Smith juts his chin. “Dressed like a hand, hauling a cart. You’re a shame to the trade.”

  My father’s smile drops. No doubt my presence doubles his shame. “Should I wait outside?” I say.

  My father extends the linen sack toward the man.

  “Go!” Head Smith spits in my father’s face. “Begone.”

  My father holds back from wiping spittle from his cheek. He draws himself taller and points to the flagon. “The enameled rim of that flagon,” he says. “I can do better. The ridges—”

  Head Smith’s nostrils flare.

  “I’m from the Smith clan at Black Lake.”

  Head Smith thumps his hammer against his open palm.

  “Chieftain once preferred our forge above any other.”

  Now Head Smith raises the hammer. His eyes say he means to break the skull of so brazen a pauper.

  As we descend the mound, my heart aches. We walk in silence, and I ponder. Is he, just now, suffering under the weight of his mother’s final words? Or fixating on my mother’s worn dress, her hesitation as she decides whether to wrap her arms around his neck? His thoughts do not come into my mind.

  “Mother doesn’t care that we sometimes go without meat,” I say.

  His eyes stay put, a step ahead of his feet.

  “Hunter should keep his mouth shut,” I say.

  Only a sideways glance.

  “My cape will do another year.”

  Nothing.

  My father sometimes says that by persistence even iron can be shaped. Not today. Today iron does not yield.

  We trudge along the road, again hauling the handcart through the cacophony of commerce. He looks neither right nor left, assessing the ironwork on display, the opportunity that awaits. He keeps his gaze on his feet, and I do the same until I catch the stink of the fishmonger’s stall. Beyond the stall, overlapping wooden planks form Luck’s shed—a narrow rectangle, no more than six paces in breadth. Still, the planks are weathered in a pattern that shows the shed has been increased in size at two points in time. It comes to me that I know that shed. I have seen its crammed interior, the maze of slight pathways cutting through the goods. An old vision—one that had not, until now, made a lick of sense. I knock my elbow against my father’s hip. “Look,” I say, pointing.

  He hardly glances up.

  “You can tell his trade is growing.”

  He does not deviate from our straight path.

  I picture our return to Black Lake: my father’s crumpled face as Hunter launches into a tale of the wealth that rains from the sky at Hill Fort, caught by anyone with upturned palms; my father’s bowed head as Fox sneers disrespect at a blacksmith unable to trade his wares.

  With even that imagined moment of Fox again nearby, my throat constricts. My voice quivers slightly as I say, “He’s called Luck for a reason.”

  “All right,” my father says. “All right.”

  And I wonder what would have happened if I had not badgered. Would he have decided on his own to call on Luck? With that old vision, was it cast in stone that I would one day find myself inside that shack? Or had that vision come as a sort of prod so that I would know to alter my father’s course, to steer a dispirited man hauling a laden handcart?

  The shed’s interior is, in truth, threaded with narrow pathways lined with stacks of unadorned pottery bowls, bins of oil lamps, heaps of plainly woven wool and more of skins. Just beyond the skins, the floor is piled with iron bars, more than I have ever seen. The pretty brooches and glass beads and garlanded bowls—all readily available to catch a woman’s eye in the marketplace’s stalls—are absent from the shed. Luck approaches and my father says, “You earn your wealth supplying the Romans at Viriconium.”

  Luck looks down his beak nose. “Trade has never been better,” he says. “You saw the marketplace.”

  “Busier than an ox’s tail when the flies are thick.”

  “The warriors on leave are only too happy to part with their wages.”

  “We saw them,” my father says. “Brutish as Fallow.”

  Luck shrugs. “They’ve grown bored at Viriconium.”

  “Now that they’ve conquered the rebel tribes?”

  Luck nods, purses his lips, appearing so much like Old Man when he gives an opinion that he considers a truth. “That defeat has made the druids restless as wind,” Luck says. “I can guarantee that.”

  My father’s face is still, and I cannot decipher whether he is thinking he was right to speculate that Fox’s arrival at Black Lake is connected to mounting druid anxiety. And what, I wonder, would Luck make of Fox ordering me to divine the outcome of a rebellion? Are Fox’s druid brethren, at this very moment, wringing hands and contemplating the tenuous security of their enclave on Sacred Isle? Does talk of rebellion fill their days? And this: Do they discuss how best to appease War Master? Has Julius Caesar’s retreat been cited as proof of the usefulness of substituting man for beast?

  “I came to trade,” my father says.

  As sweat dampens my nape, I remind myself that Feeble is the true runt, that I can run like the wind and walk the great distance to Hill Fort. No one would suggest he better earns his keep than I; no one would claim him more deserving of milled flour and hard cheese. Or perhaps they would—if they peered inside my head and saw my low thoughts, the shabby assurances I make for myself. I seek the comfort of my father’s hand.

  Luck reaches into a bin, holds out to my father something like an oversize nail, except that the blunt end circles back on itself to form a loop. “A Roman tent peg,” Luck says. “Better design than we’re used to. I can’t keep up with the demand.”

  My father runs his fingers through his hair, makes his opening offer. He would trade his ladles and cauldrons for three times their weight in iron bars. Luck laughs and counteroffers. My father tugs my hand, makes as if we are going to leave the shed, but Luck says, “Stay. Stay.”

  Luck pours mugs of mead, and after more discussion and my father pointing out the symmetry of his cauldrons, the braid trimming the base, the precision of his ladles, the gentle arc of their handles, the great distance he has traveled from remote Black Lake, Luck ushers us to a small table and goes into the street. He returns with more mead, a small sack of cherries, a plate of sliced bread, and a fist-sized vessel of olive oil. “So that you might see I am a generous man,” he says.

  “So that you might see I am a skilled blacksmith,” my father replies and slides the bronze serving platter from the linen sack.

  I watch Luck restrain himself from stroking the handiwork. As my tongue glides over the smooth contours of a cherry, he forces his attention from the platter to my father. My teeth pierce the skin. The flesh is like a plum’s, except smoother, sweeter, like honey stirred into thick cream.

  He topples the sack and a dozen cherries spill from the opening. “Go ahead,” he says to me and then to my father, “Magnificent work, but as you can see my trade does not involve magnificence.”

  I
twist the stem from another cherry, put it in my mouth.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. “The Romans know about food. You doubt me?”

  Though I shake my head, he says, “Just wait until you’ve tried greens flavored with garlic. Or, better still, meat flavored with rosemary.”

  He continues, insisting that the tribesmen’s diet has been lifted from tedium with the vegetables and herbs the Romans have introduced. He presses further with a litany of arguments in favor of the Romans—never has commerce been so brisk; never has such opportunity come to the tribesmen; with more land cleared and improved yields, the harvest is plentiful; roads and aqueducts have been built and swamps drained and coins introduced; with warring outlawed between the tribes, there is a new order about the land. In Britannia’s east, the Roman towns of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum boast stone temples and marketplaces, halls where the Romans bathe together. No tribesman had seen the likes of such engineering, such ingenuity. He says to me, would not any barbarian, gazing upon those structures or savoring a cherry, embrace the glory of Rome?

  I want to say that I do not know a barbarian to ask, also that Roman warriors smashed the Hunters’ pottery and tore our woolen partitions, that they leer at women and pilfer pheasants and eggs as though it were their right. But I press my lips shut and wonder if all he asserts is even true and also why any Roman would prefer a stone temple to a sacred grove, why any Roman would want to wash in another man’s filth. He tousles my hair, in the same way my father does, and I realize I like this Luck, with his easy smile and breezy way.

  I am sucking clean the last cherry pit when he gets back to the trade, to what he really wants. He will take the cauldrons, the ladles, and load the handcart with iron bars equal to twice the weight. My father will come back with half the iron forged into Roman tent pegs. In return for those pegs, Luck will again load the handcart with twice the weight of the forged iron.

  “It is best,” Luck finally says, “that the pegs come to me in nailed-shut crates. The druids are in the settlements again. They watch carefully now.”

  My father keeps his face blank, without hint of alarm that his conjecture to me about the druids is confirmed, without hint of surprise that Luck’s trade proposal is improper enough to necessitate secrecy, without hint of concern that Fox would surely condemn any industry undertaken on the Romans’ behalf. But as my father slides the bronze serving platter into the open mouth of the linen sack, I know he means to abandon the trade.

  Oblivious to my father’s second thoughts, Luck continues, “They’re agitating, those druids,” he says, “fanning embers of discontent. I don’t think much of them. Fanatics, incapable of reason, incapable of adopting any view other than their own. I wouldn’t blame the Romans if they outlawed druidry here like they have in Gaul.”

  My father stills.

  “They call the druids savage,” Luck says. “They point to our old ways as certain proof.”

  He glances to me, then back to my father, and I know Luck is not at all oblivious to the implications of my lame leg.

  “I’ll take your iron,” my father says, “and I’ll take a large skin, too. Hobble needs a new cape.”

  “As you please.” Luck sweeps his arm grandly toward his skins. He hands me the vessel of olive oil. “For your mother,” he says.

  I wonder if my father has the upper hand, and then decide, yes, that Luck needs him. His interest was piqued the moment my father mentioned the remoteness of Black Lake.

  My father points to a pile of woven wool. “I’ll take a length, enough for a dress.” The wool is plain, but my mother will dye it with elderberry or woad, replace the field dress that droops from her shoulders, as worn as a moth’s wing.

  Luck nods, again sweeps his arm.

  It does seem a poor trade on his part, and yet the man with his buzzard face and well-stocked shed is shrewd. Is the undertaking—forging tent pegs for the Roman army—riskier than my father has judged? Luck must think so, and he does not know that a druid lives in the household of the blacksmith he has engaged.

  “And also, an oil lamp,” my father says. “One of the bronze ones. I saw a few.”

  “You intend to melt it down?”

  “My mate deserves a fine bracelet.”

  How it would please him to put a pretty bracelet around my mother’s wrist. How satisfying to watch her cross the clearing, to see the bronze’s warm luster catch Hunter’s eye.

  Luck nods. “I’ll give you the oil lamp, and you’ll ask for nothing more.”

  I can see my father’s balled hand beneath the table, the way it drums against his thigh, a quick steady beat, as he works to keep his elation hidden from so shrewd a trader as Luck.

  My spirits rise with my father’s. He has work, the promise of more to come. My gift proved useful in tipping him toward Luck’s shed, and the idea that the trade was fated feels as soothing as Hope’s warm breath.

  Luck joins us outside as we reload the handcart. “You’ll pass through Timber Bridge?”

  I remember the large settlement near where we had spent the night. My father nods.

  “They say a pair of druids is staying there,” Luck says. “Be careful.”

  My father feigns interest in a lashing holding the iron bars in place.

  “Self-interested is what they are,” Luck says. “They can’t bear their stranglehold loosened. Can’t bear the Romans prying their druid fingers from our necks. Can’t bear the way Roman rule constrains their power.”

  I glance toward my silent father—a man content to listen, to discover what he does not know.

  “Druids are only men,” Luck continues, “imperfect in their judgment.”

  I stand wide-eyed, troubled, and yet curious that Luck does not seem to believe that the druids execute the gods’ will. I think of my father’s kin, cajoled into battle and then forever absent from Black Lake.

  Luck cocks an eyebrow. “They’ll keep conjuring, keep telling us what the gods put in their heads, until they’ve got us rising up in rebellion.”

  My father pulls me tight with one arm, and I wonder if his mind, too, has tumbled to War Master and the old ways that are, in fact, not so old.

  With his free hand, he tugs the handcart. Wheels lurch from still.

  15.

  DEVOUT

  Early morning, as Devout lay awake, a starling flew into the roundhouse, navigating the narrow gap between wattle door and frame, and perched on the foot of her pallet. In the face of so ominous a sign, she scurried to her feet and pushed open the door with enough force that it slammed into the abutting wall, waking all the household: her mother, who draped an arm over her eyes; Second Hand Widow, who bolted upright, her gaze flitting to her children, stirring amid a hodgepodge of tattered wool; Sullen, who rolled onto her back; Old Man, who said, “The cock hasn’t even crowed.” Once the starling became apparent, all, except a wailing infant, rose quickly from their pallets and began flapping their arms, clapping their hands, doing their utmost to shoo the bird outside.

  It perched on a rafter and sang the song of a house sparrow, the incessant chirps and cheeps, and then dove toward the open door but veered away at the last moment to perch on the high end of a supporting timber and let out the high-pitched call of the jackdaw. Though starlings were known mimics, it seemed this particular one taunted the household. Devout’s mother dropped to her knees, put the heel of her palm to her forehead, and called out to Protector. The din grew—the wailing, the squawking and chirping, the pleading. A pair of toddlers began to howl, joining the infant, and Old Man threatened them with a stick.

  “It’s the Romans,” Sullen said.

  The bog dwellers had had no word, knew not whether the Romans had set out from Gaul, whether they had been turned back by a tempest, a hail of spears. The hands and the tradesmen alike held their breaths as they awaited the Smith clansmen’s return, news
that the united tribes had prevailed. Sleepless on their pallets, they pulled woolen blankets to their chins, pricked their ears. Were the Romans, at this very moment, moving over the whole of the island, its plains and low hills, its highlands and bogs?

  “They’ll bash in our doors, bash in our heads,” said the eldest of Second Hand Widow’s brood.

  “Hush,” said Second Hand Widow.

  Old Man pulled a dagger from beneath his pallet.

  “Maybe it’s the Smith men,” said Devout’s mother.

  Old Man glared at her. “No bird ever flew inside to foretell a homecoming.”

  Her face held still, and it came to Old Man that she had not meant the starling heralded the Smiths’ safe return but rather dark news of their fate. “Ah.” He lowered his gaze. “How long since Hunter’s been gone?”

  Three moons had passed since Young Smith’s yelping kin left the clearing and six days since Old Hunter set out for Hill Fort in search of news. Young Smith had said he would make the trek as First Man, but Old Hunter had been insistent. He knew the route, had traded there since he was a boy. He was acquainted with the locals and the traders and was best positioned to find out what he could about the invasion and the resistance and, more specifically, about Young Smith’s kin.

  “Six days,” Devout, her mother, and Second Hand Widow said in unison. Six long days of hand-wringing as they awaited Old Hunter and the news he would bring.

  “He’ll be back by nightfall.” Old Man jutted his dagger in the direction of the starling. “If not, we’ll know the meaning of that bird.”

  The household grew dejected. Arms hung limply at sides. The starling circled the roundhouse’s interior, again called like a jackdaw, and fluttered out the door. The bird had not flown sunwise. Devout and the others touched their lips, the earth.

  They stayed fretful as they prepared for the fields—trading their night tunics for field clothes stiff and pungent with sweat and grime, securing worn scraps of leather around their feet, dividing the loaves they would eat midday. Devout remained careful not to comment on the bird, as did all the household, as if admitting it might somehow add to the portent.